


Coming Home

by eosrealis (Aurorealis)



Series: Gravity Falls: "A grunkle in every bite, or your money back!!" mini-prompts and one-shots. [3]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Gen, Homelessness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-07
Updated: 2016-03-07
Packaged: 2018-05-25 08:14:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6187081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aurorealis/pseuds/eosrealis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stanford Pines laments over the mystery shack and his own complicated feelings about the concept of home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coming Home

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr: http://eosrealis.tumblr.com/post/137797589614/dare-taken-mini-fic-prompt-u-coming-home-also

Ford was not happy when he came home. How could he be? Ford had perfectly resigned himself to spending the rest of his life lost in the multiverse. Of those thirty years, he had spent many in homes, even places that could be considered his own home.

 

That was the key of course, as there were places that could be considered his home, and yet he never managed to think of them as such. He never could, plagued with thoughts of sacrificing and unworthiness. It didn’t matter anyways, Ford had accepted his own fate. Until Stan brought him back.

 

Secretly, Ford would always wonder how Stan managed to adapt the portal in a way that anchored on Ford. It was a very complex process, and when Ford was dismantling the portal and too exhausted to keep the simmering anger up, he thought of all the recreated and even newly engineered components of the portal with awe and grudging pride. Those moments were few and far between though, as it only took the shortest of trips upstairs to rekindle his frustration.

 

Ford had never expected to come back home, and certainly had never asked for it. How could he enjoy being back when it put the world in such danger? Ford hadn’t allowed himself to think about his old house for years. He thought he’d purged out all sense of belonging sometime over the wandering years- when he’d gotten stranded in a particularly hostile universe that hadn’t discovered multidimensional travel yet. It was an unpleasant surprise for Ford to discover that he somehow still minded the state of his old house. Specifically, he minded that it had been turned into a cheesy, fake tourist trap.

 

A part of Ford marveled that Stan could keep a business going on such complete nonsense. But that part was very small. The majority of Ford’s feelings were soured at the tackiness, the fakeness, of it all. Gone were the scientific samples and experimental data that the house had been built and used for. It had all been replaces by shoddy taxidermy and bootleg recreations of overused Oregon mythology. Meanwhile, real mythological creatures roamed mere minutes away, creatures that Stan knew damn well about.

 

For all of Ford’s frustration at Stan and frustration at himself for caring in the first place, he couldn’t help some moments. There were times when he walked into the living room and found his authentic dinosaur skull- one he and Fiddleford had measured while giggling like schoolgirls over the fact that the creature had actually been ridiculously feathered. Then there were times when Ford wandered up to the attic and saw the spot where he had worshipped Bill -not that he had known it at the time- under the stained glass window, converted into a homey living space for his great niece and nephew. There was something special about the house now, when Ford managed to get beyond the whole Mystery Shack aspect.

 

It took Ford a long time to realize it. The house felt like a home. It felt even more of a home than it had before he left, despite all the changes. The difference was that it felt like a home he was sharing, one he was gone from for so long that it felt changed, but not so long that it didn’t still feel like one. Ford would never admit it, but he was glad to be back in Gravity Falls again, despite all the baggage that came with the fact. Ford was happy to be home.


End file.
